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Posts Tagged ‘KDE’

From time to time people mention that KDE UserBase Wiki has too much text and less images. As most of the wiki is about applications the easiest way to illustrate information about them is to make a screenie of them. There are some tools often used:

KSnapshot – Offers many different types of captures: entire desktop, free rectangle, entire window of an application, sections of a window. Commonly it is connected to your print button – if it is installed at least.

screenie-qt – This tool pimps up your screenie as a group of glossy tiles with 3D-effects and reflecting opacity floor. You can adjust the number of images up to 3 and move the images around.

During our Websprint2011 we discussed ways to improve pages, and decided that a tool would be helpful that can offer a default layout to capture parts of a screenie with numbers so that the author can describe these parts afterwards. A text description included in the images seems to make trouble with translation later.

Hans (Mogger) Chen found Kaption on KDE-Apps.org, which offers some neat shapes already: arrows, ellipses, rectangles and text. We contacted the developper Francesco (bardack) Di Muccio and asked him to add features especially for UserBase needs. Last week he joined us on #kde-www and we discussed possible features:

loading images into Kaption

adding numbers with a default shape and style

perhaps uploading the image directly to UserBase.

Kaption has fewer features for taking screenies than KSnapshot, but captioning is really easy and the user interface is very simple. When bardack has developped the new features and we tested them we will provide a tutorial on UserBase – though it might be obsolete as the application is that easy to use.

I am sure that this program will ease illustrating UserBase pages and enhance the use of the wiki.

Again the website of the KDE Education Project is ahead. It was the first site that migrated to the new Chihuahua skin of kde.org. It is the only one which displays info pages for applications in the same way as the main site does – but improved with 2 levels of categories. And now it is the first page with Chihuahua Skin that can be translated.

I inserted a language selection selector into the so called tool-bar next to the breadcrumbs.

But after the change to different skins (first Chihuahua and now Derry) there were several issues to take care of:

translation of the new PlasmaMenu, especially the dynamically generated part of it (application list)

translation of the page title, wich is automatically inserted at the top of the page

translation of the json-files containing information all about the applications

Issues

The skin contains some neat images with text messages like “Back home?” or “Search”. I am not sure if it is worth to translate them, too. At least the greeting “Welcome to KDE Edu!”, which is an image, should probably be replaced by a real translatable text line.

Credits

I got really much help from

Albert (tsdgeos) who introduced me to the translation system used on the Okular site

Luca (einar77) with python scripting for the json-files

Tom (toma) with debugging all the i18n calls in the php-files during WebSprint2011

Thanks a lot for their work.

Translators are very welcome to help doing the real translation. French and Greece translators did a lot already.

Supporting different languages is one of the most important feature for applications and for web sites as well. KDE Userbase Wiki is one of the few MediaWiki driven wikis supporting internationalization by Niklas Laxtröm’s awesome Translate extension.

This extension supports a new special page displaying already active translations as a tag cloud:

The font size represents the amount of already translated messages and section of the wiki.

Underneath the cloud you find a list of all languages with their active translators formatted in tag clouds, too. Look at the Danish section for instance:

The font size represents the amount of translation edits, the color of the line under the name represents the time since his last edit. If you hover name with your mouse pointer it will show more detailed information about the work of the translator. A click on the name will get you to the translator’s user page. Other useful links around this language are accessible here, too.

This feature is not only useful for translators but also promoting KDE UserBase Wiki as an international platform for sharing your knowledge of anything around KDE.

That was my first sprint and this is my first blog and you read my first post…

I loved to meet, discuss, and work with the people who took part with this sprint. The location and the weather was amazing. Only the last 100m of my way back home it rains cats and dogs – but I was able to save my notebook to get wet.

In the fist night I had a visitor with 8 legs - a natural web professional...

We not only did some concentrate work on many major and minor issues of UserBase, but also made some plans for the future. For instance we stuck with teh current LiquidThreads extension because the version 2.0 which has a much better look and feel, is broken. So we will freeze the version we have and modify it’s sources to our needs now.

We found that the wiki needs to be more inviting to add and modify content. We want to find out what visitors of UserBase really need so that we can improve the navigation. Additionally we find it confusing that there are two language selectors: one for page content (so called language bar) and one for the system messages in the sidebar.

I am very motivated in working on these places in the future.

Finally I spend many hours on preparing the edu web pages for the capacity translation system. The translators will get po-files soon.